sanctuary

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Clinton's welfare reform
was the logical conclusion of Ronald Reagan's pernicious use of the
'welfare queen' myth in the 1980s.

(Amy B. Dean, fellow,
Century Foundation)

The most brilliant
propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental
principle is borne in mind—it must confine itself to a few points
and repeat them over and over.

(Joseph Goebbels,
Propaganda Minister, Nazi Germany)

Nature and nurture

“Good wombs have born bad
sons,” as Shakespeare says in The Tempest. The nature versus
nurture debate goes back to at least the time of Plato. But perhaps
over the past fifteen or twenty years we have acquired a remarkable
pool of knowledge regarding human behavior in general, be it the
mapping of the human genome, neuroscience discoveries, behavioral
psychology or even the controversial field of genopolitics. As
individuals we are a complex mixture of genetic and environmental
factors. But who are we in assorted groups or various interests or
particular markets?

Behavioral economics it
seems to me has a great deal to offer, for example, the 2016
presidential election in the United States, which promises to be once
again less than enlightening, informative and honest.

Behavioral economics may
also have a lot to say about how we look at poverty in the U.S. and
throughout the world. Poverty in America has come out of the shadows,
for the moment at least, in part because of the issue of racism, a
central piece in understanding this country.

Where once behavioral
economics was an outlier in the field, it has now become an
influential element in understanding economic decision making. Even
the World Bank in its 2015 annual report devoted most of the document
to behavioral decision making. Ultimately, to be truly successful, it
has to influence policymakers to think in a different way. This,
however, is hardly ever easy; we humans are reluctant to let facts
get in the way of our strongly held beliefs. Call it nature vs
nurture.

My cortisol hormone just
doesn't feel right

Researchers are familiar
with what's called a hormone-receptor complex. There are steroid
hormones, which include cortisol, estrogen and testosterone.
Cortisol, for example, is released under stress, the proverbial
threat, but it can also occur by merely thinking about unpleasant
things. High levels of cortisol over long periods may cause such
illnesses as depression, heart disease and overall suppression of
the immune system.

Stress and prolonged complex
tasks can cause glucose levels in the region of the brain associated
with attention and planning to drop. Physical capabilities can
decrease but mental acuity can be affected as well.

Neurotransmitters, serotonin
and dopamine being two, are related to stress and motivation. Levels
of serotonin in an individual can affect the sense of well being and
confidence. These individual variations might cause different
reactions and possibly have a bearing on how we think about and react
to real world issues, such as violence, gay marriage and poverty.

The point of all this is
that we know a good deal more about genetic and environmental factors
when it comes to human behavior. This connects to behavioral
economists and how they have looked at the field of psychology and
the discoveries in neuroscience and have adapted and applied many of
the ideas to economics. Some have referred to behavioral economics as
the “hybrid offspring” of economics and psychology.

You've been framed

Frank Luntz, a political
operative in the early George W. Bush presidency, told the
administration that it was important to always refer to global
warming as “climate change.” This phrase, it was believed, was
less unsettling and more controllable, thus more easily ignored. The
fossil fuel industry could rest easily.

The long standing belief had
been that the “Economic Man” was rational and by in large made
self-interested decisions. Intentionally or otherwise, this idea
benefited the status quo and provided a justification for what has
been thought to be the “inherent” wisdom of what is universally
referred to as the free-market, which is hardly “free” in any
sense of the word.

What was being suggested is
that the reality was actually more about how alternatives were framed
and not about their “relative value.” It became all too often a
zero-sum game. The framing was what strongly influenced the
decisions that people made.

Now, some thirty years
later, the word “framing” is familiar to a great many people, and
certainly it's part of the strategy for both marketeers and political
operatives among others. Of course, who would want to pay a “death”
tax. Outrageous! But what about a small percentage of the rich paying
a very moderate estate tax upon their departure from the living,
considering how they benefited from America's political and economic
system? Andrew Carnegie, one of the founding fathers of the Gilded
Age, did not believe that the children of the rich ought to be handed
a pot of gold. This was the United States and we of course did not
want to create a parasitic aristocracy. You've been framed.

Now, behavioral economists
are looking at how people actually act in making economic decisions,
which could influence the kinds of programs that might be developed,
not only in dealing with poverty but improving upon the choices we
all make—unlike what the traditional economic model claims we have
been doing all along. It has been to a large degree a lovely fairy
tale. Go ahead, treat yourself and pull out that credit card. You
deserve it.

The problem with those
people

It seems that so many of the
tired, moth-eaten cliches have never gone away and have a life of
their own: character flaw, lazy, lack of self-discipline and so forth
have been the constant refrain. In my part of the country you only
have to follow the state legislatures in Missouri and Kansas to know
that obliviousness and general obtuseness have been raised to the
level of sacred text.

It's not that an individual
might be deemed unambitious, but that an entire class of people or
group of individuals have been summarily dismissed as, well,
“flawed.”

What makes behavioral
economics so compelling is the many studies that have been undertaken
and the quantifiable data gathered. It refutes so many of the
standard, mythical economic beliefs beloved by the status quo—most
obviously the comfortable and the privileged.

In the now well studied
Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944, as the allies advanced across Europe,
the Nazis let the people of Holland starve. This affected the fetuses
of pregnant women, especially those fetuses in the 2nd and
3rd trimesters. The fetuses took the cue from their
mother's low nutrient intake, but even when the war ended and there
was plenty of food, in many cases the “thrifty” metabolism
couldn't stop storing calories away. In a number of instances health
problems like diabetes developed later on for these children.

We learned that physical
deterioration was clearly obvious, but we also observed the mental
effects of starvation. Food became the central thought, above
anything else. Fast forward more than 60 years later and behavioral
economists want to know how mental states along with social and
physical environments affect economic activity on a very specific
level … realizing that one size (program) does not fit all.

While behavioral economists,
like any group of people, can have varied points of view, some basic
ideas seem to stand out, oftentimes contrary to the prevailing views.
Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard has said
that, “To put it crudely, poverty—no matter who you are—can
make you dumber.”--anywhere in the world, among any economic class
of people.

The gnawing away of
cognitive competence, counter-productive decisions, the inability to
consider the long-term best interest are all related to what
economists refer to as scarcity. While the standard belief is
generally that those poor people are poor because they make bad
decisions, the behavioral economists believe that people make bad
decisions because they are poor, perhaps obvious to some people, but
observing (in the U.S.) the Congress, many state legislatures and
numerous politicians pontificating on poverty and the poor, you would
be hard pressed to locate cognitive competence among these “decision
makers.”

This is a complex subject,
and while behavioral economics is a central part of economic theory
today, for many, it goes against deeply ingrained beliefs and vested
interests. Framing is going to matter a lot.

For those who want
additional information on the subject the following may be of
interest:

Friday, May 01, 2015

A number of years ago I was
at a global climate change conference in Washington, D.C. One day was
devoted to visiting the offices of various senators and
representatives. I ran into a cigarette lobbyist, a former
congressman from North Carolina, who was visiting the representative
from his old district who was a personal friend. We had a pleasant
chat before he was ushered into the office of his friend. While we
chatted, I wondered what he might have said if I'd told him he was
working for a criminal enterprise. Needless to say, back then, I
didn't. Probably today I would have.

The fossil fuel industry has
run a similar campaign to what the cigarette manufacturers once did.
It has worked for a very long time. It's about denial, deception and
a belief that the public in general is easily manipulated and by in
large not well informed.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The sad truth is that most
evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or
evil.

(Hannah Arendt)

Five years ago this month
the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster began in the Gulf sixty miles off
the coast of Louisiana. Five years later the region is still
suffering the consequences of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

In the late 1960s the Texaco
Petroleum Company got the concession to search for oil in a remote
region of Ecuador. Eventually some 16 billion gallons of toxic waste
were dumped in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world,
covering approximately 1,500 square miles, about the size of the
state of Delaware.

I first wrote about the
Ecuadorian oil field called Ispingo-Tiputino-Tamboccocha back in 2007
and again in 2012, see Los Afectados. As well, I had lived in Ecuador
in the early 1970s. It is now an old story but still a new story and
one that is ongoing.

A major difference, however,
is that some forty years later the size of Los Afectados (The
Affected Ones) has grown well beyond Ispingo-Tiputino-Tamboccocha,
the country of Ecuador and the continent of Latin America.

2015

On March 4, 2014 the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the
$9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment was—regardless of its merit--the
product of fraud, racketeering, false testimony and bribery
instigated by the plaintiff and its lead attorney, Steven Donziger,
with the defendant being Chevron Corp. The judge stated that Chevron
did not have to pay anything. It was “unenforceable.”

Some people have referred to
this case, which has been going on for some twenty years, as
“never-ending litigation,” even though Chevron has some very deep
pockets with considerable political influence. According to an
analyst with OilPrice.com, Chevron in 2013 in the fourth quarter
alone made $4.9 billion.

As of April 2015 the
plaintiff expects the case to come before the Canadian Supreme Court.
A Chevron subsidiary is developing the Alberta tar sands. Chevron
also has assets in Argentina and Brazil, which Donziger has indicated
he will go after.

The way the world is

Lost in this endless
litigation, political maneuvering and money exchanging hands, the
fact is that no one is disputing that a large portion of the Amazon
region in Ecuador has suffered serious environmental damage along
with crops, soil and water having been contaminated and people
getting sick.

Above all else it is the
indigenous community voices in the region that may have been drowned
out. Will many of them die before there is any conclusion to this
case? Will their children have to contend with the same environmental
damage?

Was “evil” committed in
Ecuador forty years ago? I suppose it depends on your point of view.
Did the executives at Texaco know the difference between right and
wrong back then? Did the military junta who ran the country care
about what happened in the jungle?

Texaco was well aware of
“best” practices. They chose to ignore them. I doubt the generals
cared at all about indigenous people in the Amazon. They wanted the
money. Can Chevron be held responsible for what Texaco did? The
government of Ecuador “oversaw and certified” the successful
completion of remediation by Texaco. Texaco became a subsidiary of
Chevron in 2001. Chevron never drilled for oil in Ecuador. The case
of course will play out.

The only real option is
confrontation. Unless we afflict the comfortable everywhere, our
actual future at the very least will be a dreary 21st
century serfdom. We are Los Afectados across the globe and ultimately
we have only ourselves to blame.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

A bit of levity regarding
the minds of climate change deniers, but the ultimate consequences are
likely to be anything but amusing. The question is as always how do
we go about changing those minds or ignoring them completely?

Saturday, April 04, 2015

Liberty cannot be
preserved without general knowledge among the people.

(John Adams, second
president of the United States)

This video came out two or
three years ago, but it's telling on so many levels that it is worth
looking at more than once. The reality is that it may be even more
pertinent three years later. The mere “tweaking” of the system
will not change anything.

Wealth Inequality in
America

The U.S. is now the most
unequal of all Western nations and has a lot less social mobility
than Canada and Europe. In the 2014 mid-term elections the voter
turnout was as low as the1830 elections, where only white male
property owners could vote. It is in the short-term interest of the
plutocracy (read globally) to keep it this way.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Several days ago I received
some material from the Sierra Club reminding me to renew my
membership, which I had let lapse for a couple of years. What caught
my attention however was a short letter that was included in the
membership material. The letter read as follows:

“Dear Human:

Imagine that, little by
little, your home was taken away from you. The forests and mountains
where you once roamed freely disappeared, replaced by roads and
concrete buildings.

What if politicians in
suits, someplace far away, decided your fate … decided that you,
your family, your friends, and neighbors had become a nuisance—a
menace—to those who had invaded your home?

And so now, you must die.

Imagine these politicians
rallying for your slaughter … ignoring what science has told them,
encouraging citizens to hunt you down and kill you.

Imagine your family under
attack. Defenseless, with nowhere left to hide, you must dodge
bullets from the ground and sky, just to find food for yourself and
your young children.

Imagine that, in one of
these public hunts, you watched your offspring die.

Then you will know the
terror that wolves face every day … and why we so desperately need
your help.

After all, you and your
fellow humans are the only ones who can save us. Our fate is in your
hands.

So I hope you will answer
this cry for help. You are our only hope. And time is running out ….”

Murder for fun, profit and prestige

The late, great comedian
George Carlin once remarked that we humans can't destroy the Earth.
The planet will deal with us without difficulty. I remain optimistic
that after humankind vanishes (at least the current variety of Homo
sapiens), the remaining life on Earth, as science writer Michael
Tennesen says, “ will survive, adapt, diversify, and proliferate.”

I don't want to think that
the combination of our technology, slow evolutionary development and
general ignorance could actually turn our planet into an
uncompromising nightmare like that offered up by the novelist Cormac
McCarthy in his novel The Road.

Yet, regardless of whether
or not we humans do ourselves in sometime in the future, the mind
numbing misery we're inflicting on other species right now is
appalling. It is conceivable that up to 50 percent of plant and
animal species could have gone extinct by the end of the century.
Unlike other mass extinctions, the principal cause this time will
most likely be humankind. There's a reason that most scientists refer
to our current geologic age as Anthropocene.

Wide areas of Asia
currently, because of official corruption, greed, ignorance and even
what is casually called “cultural” cuisine, are destroying plant
and animal life across the planet at an astonishing rate. We humans
have become like the invasive plant kudzu on steroids.

While we collectively—with
some notable exceptions—have been killing and destroying most
everything around us for thousands of years, it was far less
noticeable before the industrial age and a global population under
two billion. But now, with a population of more than 7 billion humans
and increasing, we are destroying life on Earth on an industrial
scale, seemingly unaware of its consequences for us.

So what ought we to do? One
possibility certainly is that we may not be able to do anything in
time. Fields like neuroscience and behavioral genetics have provided
considerable insight in how humans think and process information and
why we often do what we do ... but, the “so what” question
however can't be tossed aside.

How do we confront, educate
and find the resources fast enough to turn the human death cult into
a manageable problem at the very least. Cowboy yahoos in the American
West, clueless Chinese bourgeoisie desperate for the “bling” of
ivory and other human predators are not going away anytime soon.

Maybe it does begins with
trying to understand what the wolf could be thinking as he stares at
his dead cub bleeding to death from the gunshot wound. Maybe we have
to find better ways to talk to narcissistic Homo sapiens. Anyway, I
renewed my membership in the Sierra Club. Giving up can't be an
option.

For an unvarnished
assessment of wildlife destruction read The Politics of Extinction.
Getting angry is good but then come up with a plan. We need one right
away.

Monday, January 05, 2015

The loneliest moment in someone's
life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all
they can do is stare blankly.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott
Fitzgerald)

Accepting

It's the unsettling truth that may be
the hardest part right now for a large portion of white America;
after all, the U.S. has the oldest functioning Constitution in the
world, and that might be the problem on any number of levels.

It was the brilliant James Madison,
author of the United States Bill of Rights and one of the authors of
The Federalist Papers who, in 1787, said, “They ought to be
constituted [the nation] as to protect the minority of the opulent
against the majority.” Ah, always the dangerous mob, the rabble, a
consistent yet unspoken “through-line” of the United States.

Is an 18th century
document going to serve our needs in the 21st century?
Most likely not. Our social and political myths—created most
certainly by white America and in particular the “minority of the
opulent”--have largely remained intact for more than 200 years. The
last occupying foreign army in the United States was the British
during the war of 1812.

The many reasons given for not voting
in the recent mid-term election represent at the very least
intellectual laziness, be they offered by the “millennials,”
those that just find the Republican party repugnant and of course the
“disenchanted” liberals. But we've reached the point where we can
probably say “so what” with some qualifications. The rot has
advanced too far.

The Democratic party is a feckless
relic, a hollow shell; yet, it possibly could morph into some sort of
sane conservative movement, at some point in the future. The handful
of genuine Democratic political progressives in the party, and they
are only a handful, ought to be spending their time building a new
progressive movement elsewhere.

The Republican party, the party of
Lincoln, at least outside the benighted Confederacy, is really about
the intentional development of an authentic, nativist, totalitarian
movement, what the Europeans were familiar with in the 20th
century and that may be once again rearing its head in Europe in the
21st century.

Black America, more than anyone else,
clearly has a compelling reason to develop an organized and
disciplined movement, one capable of acquiring greater political
power at the national and most definitely at the local level.

The Occupy movement demonstrated that
people could come together for political change with a serious moral
purpose, but Occupy ultimately floundered and became a minor irritant
to the kleptocracy and the political hacks that do its bidding.

We seem to have difficulty accepting
the fact at the present time, but radical change is never a brief
“get together” without any clear, definable objectives. To
succeed, a movement has to ultimately bring in large, diverse groups
of people of all ages, who aren't going away under any circumstances.

Of course it's about power, gathering
it in and confronting those who refuse to give it up. Above all, it
has to be unremitting and offer an understandable alternative to the
status quo. This is not something done overnight nor is it a fervent
wish for some messianic vision to make it happen.

An excellent time to begin is in
January 2015. There will be more than enough motivation to go around.
Once again from The Great Gatsby, a novel about illusion: “Americans
while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate
about being peasantry.” Well, we'll find out.

For an interesting documentary on the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the use of police repression
and the connections between what happened more than a 100 years ago
and today, watch the video below.

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About Me

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountains." (Aldo Leopold, "Thinking Like a Mountain")
"We are the rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it." (Frederick Townsend Martin, 19th century plutocrat)